A change in presentation for 4K movies

[Tony]

This is being posted in response to this exchange which is about accomodation-2160...

Other people can tell me if I'm a dummy, but this format had thick black borders when I went into fullscreen; it didn't actually fill the frame.

That's expected on the 4K version. The 4K version is pillar-boxed.

I guess the real question is whether you intended to make a change in the way 4K movies are presented. I've compared accommodation on my machine to the last 5 or 6 movies and, my program, VLC, on my Mac, displays the movie differently than previous movies. When put into full screen mode, the movies has black borders on all four side where the movies hope-chest-2-DC-2160 and anniversary-2160 only display black borders on 2 sides. (Top and bottom) It is obvious that the script changed since you are providing a new 1080p version instead of the previous 720p version. So did you intend for this movie to change to having a border on all four sides rather than the original top and bottom border?

A side note. It is interesting that when I ask the 720p and 1080p versions to display full screen, they display with no border on my 4k monitor. The 4k previous movies all display with the Tom/Bottom border by default in full screen and I can get it to have no border at all if I ask for a 16:9 aspect ratio.  When I ask to use a 16:9 aspect ratio on accomodation-2160 in full screen, it displays borders on the Right and Left only. So I'm reasonably sure there is a change to aspect ration on the new movie also.

Tony

[Daphne]

OK, you asked!

"4K" is really two different resolutions: 3840 x 2160 (typically called UHD) and 4096 x 2160 (called DCI). Nearly all of our 4K movies are shot in DCI resolution (or a higher resolution that neatly scales to DCI). Accommodation was shot in UHD, which is slightly smaller in the horizontal than DCI.

However, for boring reasons I won't go into here, we deliver all of our 4K movies in DCI resolution. That means we have to pillarbox (that is, add black) to the left and right to pad UHD to DCI. For some reason, VLC starts out with a window that includes black at the top or bottom in this case; if you adjust the window size at all, VLC gets rid of the top and bottom black. QuickTime Player, for example, doesn't start out with the black at top and bottom. I'm not sure why VLC behaves the way it does.

The same pillarboxing happened with Shoot House 2, although for some reason no one commented on it at that time.

The reason that the HD version (1920 x 1080, although it if were the old 1280 x 720, it would be the same) doesn't have the pillarboxing is that UHD is exactly twice or three times those resolutions, so there's no need to pillarbox them. Our DCI movies are slightly cropped when generating the HD versions.

At some point, we'll fix our rendering pipeline so it can produce UHD movies without the pillarboxing, but, as they say in the movies, "today is not that day."

[Tony]

Thank you for taking the time for that.